Design your culture to thrive amid constant change
Lead your organization to shape its evolution with confidence and resilience, boosting employee mental health and engagement by connecting diverse thinking styles to release the collective genius.
Higher innovation revenue
Improvement in
well-being
68%
19%
43%
51%
Your organization operates in an environment of rapid change and high-stakes innovation. Research shows that teams with a mix of cognitive styles—and the skills to connect them—excel at solving complex problems. By building a culture that attracts and integrates diverse thinking styles, inspired by the strengths associated with neurodivergences such as autism and ADHD, your organization gains a critical competitive edge.
Traditional neuro-inclusive approaches are reactive, accommodating people who declare a need. My proactive, top-down framework integrates cognitive inclusion into everyday leadership and team practices. This approach ensures that diverse thinkers are actively sought out and supported, leading to healthier, more engaged employees and improved organizational outcomes.
Better employee retention
Larger pool of talent
Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) points in 1 year
+34
eNPS points - resilience and connectedness over 3 years despite COVID lockdowns and a major organizational restructure.
+64
Why a top-down approach complements bottom-up accommodations
A top-down approach integrates cognitive inclusion into leadership behaviors, team practices, and organizational policies, ensuring that inclusion is proactive, scalable, and sustainable. It complements bottom-up accommodations by creating a culture where every thinking style is valued, reducing the need for reactive adjustments. Here’s why it’s essential:
Organizational culture transforms faster when it’s leadership models inclusive behaviors, setting the tone across all teams.
Scalability
Embedding cognitive inclusion into everyday behaviors, processes, and policies ensures lasting change and reduces over-reliance on individual accommodations.
Sustainability
Many neurodivergent employees are not formally diagnosed or choose not to disclose their differences due to stigma or bias. A universally inclusive culture meets these hidden needs without requiring self-identification.
Fairness
Assuming that neurotypical employees are always in the majority and so should adapt is unfair; tech teams, for example, may have a higher proportion of autistic thinkers than neurotypical thinkers. Cognitive inclusion is not one-size-fits-all and requires mutual respect and shared accountability among all team members.
Shared responsibility
Guided by the cognitive styles of neurodivergent individuals, cognitive inclusion benefits everyone—transcending age, background, disability, ethnicity, gender, and other identities. This approach amplifies the universal principle that inclusion drives innovation, resilience, and success for all.
Universal design benefits
Hello, I’m Dr Lisa Colledge.
Welcome to my website. I’m delighted you’re spending some time here.
I’ve spent years learning how to motivate scalable change in organizational cultures, and make it sustainable. Even with success in several different kinds of organizations, with different kinds of visions, everything really fell into place when I found out that one of my children is autistic, and learned how to successfully navigate the differences that are very present in our family and experienced the transformative results.
My website is dedicated to the incredible benefits that your organization can experience by changing in a way guided by those kinds of learnings.
This is about a kind of diversity that you can’t see.
It’s diversity in the way we think.
It’s cognitive diversity.
Every single one of us has a preference in how we take in information, how we perceive it, and how we use it.
When we work in that preference, we have the most energy available to give to our work, we contribute our best, and we do so in a way that is protective of our mental health.
What are the benefits to your organization of making sure that people with all these different cognitive styles have the same opportunity to contribute, and to thrive in their careers?
The key benefits are innovation, and its friend with a longer perspective - resilience.
The ability to be innovative, to be resilient, is the ability to adapt when something changes.
And if you anticipate change by developing the capability that I will introduce shortly, you won’t just be reacting to change with a short-term mindset of damage control, you will embrace change and be able to use it to create a competitive advantage – not only in your business outcomes, but also in your ability to attract and retain talent because working in this way is really fun and rewarding and nobody wants to leave.
How does it work?
Let’s say you’ve got an idea. You’ve put some facts and your experience together in a way that no one has ever thought of before. And you can clearly see the outcome and the benefit to your customers.
Now, if you’ve hired a lot of people who think like you, you’ll have wonderful, stimulating brainstorms where people love your idea, and build on your idea and share other ideas.
But none of those people will be good at evaluating which idea to invest in.
They won’t be strong at influencing people to build your idea.
They won’t be a natural at planning, or executing the plan to completion, or selling it to your customers.
They won’t excel at working on the finances.
That’s because the cognitive style of being great at having ideas – someone like Richard Branson, the Founder of the Virgin Group - needs a different brain structure than the cognitive style of motivating people, or of planning. We can see this from brain imaging.
Now I’m mentioning Richard Branson because he’s very outspoken about this. He struggles to understand the finances. Sure, he can learn to become better at the finances, but he’ll never excel at it.
So with lots of the same kind of brain, it makes sense, intuitively, that you start to get into trouble when you need to adapt.
Lots of Richards, lots of ideas, but no outcome.
Lots of planners? Still no outcome.
Lots of sales experts? You get the idea…
Logically, the solution would be to have teams that mix up different types of brain.
And that’s exactly what the research shows.
Diversity you can see – like gender, age, ethnicity – doesn’t make any difference to whether a team is good at solving problems.
One example given by the researchers was of a homogeneous-looking group of white men who were better at solving a problem than a diverse-looking group of research scientists – because they were cognitively diverse.
Cognitive diversity is the enabler for being great at innovation, for being resilient, for being a wonderful healthy place to work that attracts and retains talent.
But you need to activate that enabler because someone who is an ideator and someone who is a planner, for example, are not natural collaborators.
The activator is cognitive inclusion.
A cognitively-inclusive culture is designed and trained to be trusting, psychologically safe and open to idea-sharing.
Someone will be curious to a new idea instead of resistant.
They will support it instead of shooting it down.
There is the mindset of succeeding as a team.
Your ideators, evaluators, influencers, planners, executors – they all learn to value and reinforce each other’s contributions.
Cognitive inclusion is about behavior and processes and policies that focus on the collective genius.
That’s how you become a natural at innovating. That’s how you can be confident you’ll be resilient and remain successful no matter the next Covid or Gen-AI or whatever disruptor it is that’s going to come along.
That’s the Service I offer you.
You can learn more about how I do this by watching the short companion film to this one on the main Services page of this website.